Blog & Newsroom

Automation as a service delivers the best customer experiences

Reliability and scalability have always been key priorities for IT. With the unprecedented business impacts from COVID-19, they’re requirements. Your services — and your customers — depend on them. Many organizations spend significant time and expense to support the vision of an adaptable, always-on enterprise, and too many struggle to achieve it in spite of that investment. Time consumed by workarounds, patches and daily management, along with costs for on-premises hardware and licensing, can quickly spiral out of control.

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Workload automation is the next step for digital transformation

With the coronavirus crisis putting business as usual on hold, organizations are looking for more resilient ways to manage and reduce IT complexity. This, combined with a sudden need to have employees operate remotely from multiple locations, means that digital transformation plans are moving faster than ever. A key element in successful digital transformation, according to Dan Twing, president of Enterprise Management Associates® (EMA™), is the modernization of “the IT tooling used to develop applications and manage the IT infrastructure.” This is where workload automation and job scheduling come in.

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Purpose built for SaaS: What it means for business

Several tool providers claim to offer workload automation via SaaS, but, in reality they offer on-premises solutions that have been lifted and shifted to the cloud, without any changes made to take advantage of the inherent benefits of this new approach. Sure, by moving existing workload automation tools to the cloud, organizations take away the burden of running the software on an in-house datacenter, but the tools themselves still have the same limiting legacy architecture that causes headaches for businesses and IT.

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How automation-as-a-service drives success in digital transformation

Digital business transformation, defined by Gartner as “the process of exploiting digital technologies and supporting capabilities to create a robust new digital business model,” requires organizations to fundamentally change the way they operate to become much more agile. Workload automation as a service, delivered via SaaS, provides critical support for this agility by fully exploiting the attributes of cloud technology. One of the challenges that comes with digital business transformation is increased complexity due to a hybrid approach in which systems are located in and interoperate across different on-premises,

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Modern workload automation improves business outcomes 3 ways

We’ve already established that migrating to modern workload automation (WLA) is easier than most people think. There are three key benefits that deliver guaranteed positive business outcomes. In “The Shifting Role of Workload Automation”, analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates® (EMA™) found that a majority of IT and business professionals strongly agree that their organization could be made more efficient by upgrading their scheduling and WLA tools. They’re right. Three of the most attractive outcomes of modern job-scheduling software are that they improve speed,

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The challenges of moving from legacy schedulers and WLA tools (and how to overcome them)

We’ve recently discussed how some companies end up with a mixed bag of workload automation (WLA) tools, and the reasons this can happen. It’s all very well talking about this after the fact, but the reality is that many businesses — all too many — are caught between the “old” world and the “new.” The concerns about fully migrating away from old technology will be familiar to many: data integrity is paramount, downtime is an unacceptable outcome,

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Process automation for unicorns — The secret to billion-dollar success?

Regular readers of the technology and business press will probably be familiar with the term “unicorn” — first popularized back in 2013 by TechCrunch. It was used in an article about venture capital and referred to the unlikely eventuality that any startup an investor backed would go on to achieve a valuation of more than $1 billion. It was also a fairly narrow definition, as it only looked at United States-based software businesses started in 2003.

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Automate for simplicity and flexibility

In 1960, Vice Admiral Paul D. Stroop, chief of the United States Navy’s weapons bureau at the time, put a plan in place to increase the reliability and reduce the cost of producing the Navy’s aerial weaponry. Project KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) was born — and it’s a principle that’s still applicable to most enterprises today, despite the seemingly highly-complex, interconnected processes that drive them. Putting automation at the heart of processes is essential to achieve the always-on approach most businesses now require — and settling for time-based batch processing just doesn’t cut it anymore.

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Automated scheduling in action: How Whitbread achieved automation success

Since the start of the year, we’ve devoted time to discussing the benefits of automation, as well as the real world costs and potential pitfalls of relying on outdated workload automation (WLA) solutions. And while we pride ourselves on the simplicity, scalability and transparency of the process automation services we deliver, we also know that real-life examples can really help people see the benefits and envisage their own automation journey. Simplify the landscape One of the biggest problems enterprises face when considering newer automation technologies is the patchwork of tools they’ll be replacing.

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Growing pains: Why perpetual change is the only answer

If the constant pressure to modernize, transform and generally maintain a state of perpetual change feels like an invention of the modern age, you’d be wrong. In the 6th Century BCE, Greek philosopher Heraclitus stated that “the only thing that is constant is change.” While recognition of the need for change — or indeed, the inevitability of it — isn’t news to businesses, acting on it is by no means easy. The need to implement a digital-first strategy isn’t the sweat-inducing demand that it once was — but the unpleasant truth is that we want to change without going through the uncomfortable process of change.

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The new paradigm: Automation-as-a-service

In mathematics, the idea of “bounded value” generally refers to the notion that there’s a limit to the value of “x.” Conversely, “unbounded value” means there’s no maximum or minimum value of “x.” In automation, a similar notion carries through — there’s no minimum value you can extract by using a tool such as RunMyJobs by Redwood on a limited set of processes, but there’s also no maximum value, as it scales efficiently for businesses of all sizes and complexities.

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Is 100% automation really feasible – and do I want it?

Fewer errors. Repetitive tasks eliminated. Speedier execution of processes. These are among the promises of “end-to-end automation,” or “100% automation.” But the shift can still be a daunting prospect for a company without prior experience. Concerns around a lack of process oversight and audit requirements, or vulnerability to errors going unnoticed, are entirely avoidable. In some cases, they’re based on interactions with more primitive automation tools. Consider the path to 100% automation as analogous to regular cars evolving into self-driving cars.

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